RE-PRINT #1: 1 2 3 (1992) by Stephen Bram and David Morrison

'In 1992, artist Stephen Bram and architect David Morrison collaborated in the production of three staple-bound, xeroxed books to accompany an exhibition at City Gallery, Melbourne. The books were published in a small edition by Pataphysics Books, run by Leo Edelstein and Yanni Florence. Re-print #1: 1 2 3 (1992) presents the three books produced by Bram and Morrison, collated in a single 1:1 scale reprint.

The Re-print project is a curated series that reintroduces out-of-print artist publications to a contemporary audience. The series also exploits the character of the reprints to insert interventions in public archives: introducing material that was never legally deposited, or reinserting previously archived publications in the form of mediated replications, thereby indexing the originals.

For more than twenty-five years, Stephen Bram has produced artworks made in relation to external points in space. He describes this as a concern for articulating the relationship between the conceptual/structural interior of an artwork and the external spaces that the artwork inhabits.

The 1992 City Gallery exhibition consisted of an edition of ten plotter drawings, showing different views of an array of objects. The three books that accompanied the exhibition were products of Bram’s rigorous indexing experiments: one showed basic elements used to make up the original array of objects; another presented views that made up the exhibited edition; and the third showed the whole array as seen from the outside.

A reprint only comes into being in reference to externalities. Its form and content are proscribed by the original to which it refers, and it attains conceptual significance through its relationship to processes and discourses that shape the space it inhabits. Bram’s core indexing practice is thus reenacted in the making and archiving of the reprint.

Re-print #1 has been legally deposited in state and federal printed matter archives, and through its mediated design, will attach a traceable visibility to the original project, reasserting its place within contemporary and historic narratives of artistic practice.'